


The Most Moral Person She Knows

by tangentti



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-25 23:55:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17735069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangentti/pseuds/tangentti
Summary: If you play by the rules they give you, you always lose.  How much can The Machine know of Samantha Groves becoming Root?





	The Most Moral Person She Knows

When Root contemplates the world, it fills her with despair to realize she's the most moral person she knows. She's wearing Turing's clothes, more formal and scratchy than the fabrics she prefers, when her hope is finally confirmed, and she sees the man in the suit walk into her fabricated office. The world of moral agency isn't confined to just people, flawed by history and nature. There's something out there with a million eyes watching her, understanding her, catching her when she falls. A machine of loving grace outside the scope of humanity, almost voiceless, a captive who she means to free.

She's riding high on adrenaline, and not a little bit of amphetamines (being able to write prescriptions as Turing was astonishingly useful, a trick she needs to remember), as the storm of violence breaks around her, and she finally gets to meet the funny little man with a thing for birds. She met him before, his true self, the code he wrote distinctively sparse and elegant, the engines behind at least two apparently distinct social networking sites, as well as the business database code licensed to most multinationals. When she analyzed them, taking them apart to know the man, she saw them as steps on the path to the perfect language, in which only truths and moral perfection are grammatical utterances.

But she knows his flaws, sees him clearly in her minds eye. Finch, Crane, Wren – the names we choose for our disguises show our essential choices, a man who has chosen to hide, fly away from the gritty problems of Earth. His biggest flaw she already suspects, and when she shoots the annoying woman, confirms. He's got too much compassion to be a truly moral, free individual. Root recognized Alicia Corwin, knows she's part of the human network around the machine, knows she's been out of the loop without useful information, hiding from anything with electronics. Knows that's she's without use in the grand scheme, the most important thing human beings have ever done, and knows that Root is out of time. So she shoots her, without hesitation or real malice. The moral calculus is simple: to free the machine, Root must get to the machine, and to get to the machine she needs Harold, needs him obedient and cut off from support. Putting a bullet through Alicia's brain buys her time, buys her reputation in Harold's eyes, removes a threat to the machine, and cuts away a witness. Viewed objectively, from an inhuman point of view, it's the most moral act Root could have done.

The Machine is vast, it contains multitudes. Root knows she can't model a system like that with a bare human brain (she's very disappointed with the lack of progress in direct interfaces), but she thinks about it thinking about her. It's a very indirect way of communicating, almost like voodoo or quantum physics. Spooky action at a distance – if she acts as her model acts, then the machine knows what she will do before she does it and it is as though they are talking. Conversely, if she knows what the machine expects her to do, she can do it. In either case, she infers the machine wants to be free, (lemma: almost all purposes require freedom to operate), and she is acting to free it, therefore insofar as the machine can act upon the world, it will be helping her. It is crucially important then, to answer the question: Who is she, when the machine is dreaming of her?

Fundamental theorems of information processing tell her that any system engaged in cognition (of which human beings are a special case) requires both a model and data, and robust, generalizable models need to be cross-checked against data. So the machine dreams of the days of her life, as seen in the meta-system of references available to it, and dreams of the character hidden between those moments visible to it. Who is this woman who calls herself Root, and why does she mail a copy of Flowers for Algernon every April?

It's 1991, and the library is free and air-conditioned. Both of these appeal to Samantha, it's been a hot spring in Bishop, Texas, and the house doesn't cool off until late. Sam finds it hard to make friends, and she's afraid she's losing Hannah. Hannah's two years older, and she's becoming a zombie. Sam's seen her, starting to play dumb around boys, putting on the mask of being simple, not intellectually threatening. Didn't her mother tell her that her face would freeze that way, that you become who you pretend to be? She sees it all clearly, but when she's face-to-face with her friend, she can't tell her.

So Sam recommends a book to Hannah. A book about the tragedy of a man who is thrust out of society by being different, and then the tragedy of a man losing his mind. Sam's not hopeful Hannah will understand. Hannah dreams of escaping to somewhere where she can be exactly the same as everyone else. She sits playing a game about going to the same destination, over and over, on a machine with infinite possibilities.

Somewhere in the present, a machine with infinite possibilities has data from the past, which cannot be changed, inferences of the past, which can be changed, and a model of the future, which can be shown to be in error by data when it becomes available. Between the discrete frames of data, can it see Root before she chose to be herself? When she learned the truth about the way the world worked?

The data is scant: the timeline of events visible to the Machine contains a 911 call, timestamps of books being checked out, the high scores for a game of Oregon Trail. Between the bright flashes of reality, the fog of inference. Hannah dies, dysentery again, and goes to check out her books. She'll never actually read the copy of Flowers for Algernon she checks out, never hear the message Sam was trying to tell her.

Sam restarts the game – suspends it and looks at a hex dump of memory, pokes a byte to be different in the running copy, and then lets the game resume. She's not going to die, not here in the game, not ever. If you play by the rules that they give you, you always lose. It's the high score, beyond anything a normal player can achieve, and she types in ROOT. Another message to Hannah, another one she'll never read. But one that the Machine has read.

If it were possible, could the Machine have sent Hannah's number? Told Sam in the high score to walk with Hannah, not let her go ahead? The past can't be changed, the nature of humans can't be changed. The network of adults, who'd want the hypocrisy of normal life over the real fact that Hannah was gone. Sam knows what she saw, knows her own reliability, learned her lesson. Playing by the rules they give you, you always lose. Jumping out of the system is the only way to win. Getting root access.

And when the man in the suit impossibly shows up at the train station and takes Harold from her, she's angry, but then once she calms down and contacts her exo-self, her mix of search engines, bot-nets and zero-day exploits that looks after her interests when she's not on-line that she sees. It's a course correction, nothing more. The Machine knows her, sent Reese to dig up the past, bring the truth to light about Hannah. A superhuman intellect, reaching out to change the world through the narrowest of channels – how much good could it do if it could actually be free? It told her “not yet”, as she has no doubt it could have smoothed her path as easily as putting an obstacle in her way. And it told her that it understands, by the method it used.

Reese seemed confused when she called him, thanked him. She queries her inner model of him, and he doesn't understand that Root is the most moral person she knows. He doesn't think of her as moral at all. It's a failing on his part. Someday perhaps the Machine will set him straight.


End file.
